The present invention relates to machine translation. More specifically, the present invention relates to training and using machine translation systems.
Machine translation systems are systems that receive an input in one language, translate it, and provide an output in the second language. A key component in this translation is a human-authored bilingual dictionary, which includes human-authored entries that provide direct translations from a content word in one language to a content word in the other language. In general, it has been thought that such bilingual dictionaries are critical to forming a functioning machine translation system and that without them the automatic translation will not be accurate.
Because of the perceived need for human-authored bilingual dictionaries, the prior art has expended vast resources of time and money to develop such dictionaries and to keep them up to date. The fact that designers of machine translation systems continue to incur this high expense shows that those skilled in the art believe such bilingual dictionaries to be critical to obtaining accurate machine translations.